Chatting about Lewis Carroll with Kara Miller of Innovation Hub

How did Lewis Carroll change children's literature and publishing? Those were the questions that Kara Miller wanted to know about when she interviewed me from WGBH's radio show  "Innovation Hub." The show airs Saturday, Nov. 21, at 10 a.m. eastern time. Here's a link to the blog post: http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/2015/11/20/what-you-dont-know-about-alice-wonderland/

We had fun chatting about how Lewis Carroll was influential in changing children's literature from didactic to more entertaining. We also talked about how Carroll was involved in publishing the first Alice book.

I appreciated the opportunity share the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publcation of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" with WGBH, a radio station I enjoyed listening to when I lived in Boston.

Update on Wednesday, January 27, 2016 at 09:56PM by JAS

Thanks to Innovation Hub for re-tweeting about my interview on Lewis Carroll's birthday.

WGLT interviews me about Alice in Wonderland's 150th anniversary

Thanks to Judy Valente for putting together a smart, charming piece about the 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Judy has done so many interesting and intriguing radio pieces for WGLT. Whenever she has interviewed me, it has been a good experience and she always makes me sound much better.

Here's a link to the interview. https://news.illinoisstate.edu/2015/10/alice-wonderland-turns-150/WGLT's Charlie Schlenker took this photo of me and aa selection of Alice books. 

Why Harper Lee used the title To Set a Watchman & more on new book

The announcement of the publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, which is both a sequel and prequel to her classic To Kill a Mockingbird, is a confirmation of William Faulkner’s famous statement:

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

I was interviewed this morning on WJBC about the new novel and wanted to share more of my thoughts here. Harper Lee’s new novel is in fact an old novel. She wrote it prior to the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960. The title is the first working title of the manuscript which would become To Kill a Mockingbird. Originally, Mockingbird was titled Go Set a Watchman. She later revised the book with the title Atticus, and then revised again to To Kill a Mockingbird. Charles Shield wrote about these books in his unofficial biography of Harper Lee, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee.

What many commentators have overlooked (but the Birmingham News did not) is the Biblical reference in this new title. Go Set a Watchman comes from the King James translation of Isaiah 2:16:

“For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.”

As a writer who told Roy Newquist in 1964 that "all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama," Harper Lee is steeped in the Bible as is her character Miss Maudie, the cheerful neighbor who is a female mentor to Scout. But as the title of the new novel suggests, it may be a more darker novel than To Kill a Mockingbird since the reference in Isaiah to the watchman is about the prediction of the fall of Babylon. So, if Go Set a Watchman is set 20 years after the events of TKAM and features many of the same characters, the time period has changed. TKAM takes place in 1935 when Scout is 9. The sequel will take place in approximately 1955, when Scout is 29.

The publisher said in the press release announcement:

Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, Atticus. She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.

This means that Atticus, who was nearly 50 in TKAM, is now in his early 70s. It also means that Scout, who has been living in New York City, returns to her hometown of Maycomb. Between 1935 and 1955, the cultural and political landscape of the South has been transformed by the rise of the Civil Rights movement. For instance, in December 1955, Rosa Parks, under the guidance of Martin Luther King, Jr., initiated the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Montgomery would be within a few hours of Maycomb (Monroeville). Alabama would continue to be a flashpoint in the Civil Rights era, a legacy that it is still coming to terms with.

If this is a novel that was written before TKAM and is not as heavily edited, it may not be as strong a work. But very few novels are as wonderfully written as TKAM. Nevertheless, readers of TKAM will want to read the sequel and to see how characters such as Atticus, Scout, and others mature and change over time.

The timing of the announcement of this novel probably has much to do with the recent death of Harper Lee’s older sister Alice who died in November 2014. Alice, who like their father, was a practicing lawyer until she was 103 years old. Alice served as Harper Lee’s lawyer and protector from unwanted publicity. The word was that the other books she was working on were lost in a burglary. 

Alice later told a Chicago Tribune reporter that the book never got beyond the conceptual stage.

It is clear that Harper Lee, like Boo Radley, did not want to be in the limelight, as she explained to Oprah. Alice, who Harper Lee called her ‘Atticus in a skirt,’ is no longer alive to protect Lee’s literary legacy.

One of my favorite former professors when I was a student at Stamford University, was Wayne Flynt, who is aWayne Flint friend of Harper Lee. Flynt, an emeritus Auburn University professor, talks with her regularly. The Birmingham News interviewed Flynt yesterday and said that he saw her over the weekend. He described her as “quite lucid, because I was there talking with her.” He told NPR today that:

Lee can still quote long passages of Shakespeare from memory and discuss the complete works of C.S. Lewis. She can still write and she reads voraciously, using a giant magnifying machine. He says Lee is hard of hearing but sound of mind.

What  is certain is that she has been frail since her stroke in 2007, going deaf and blind. But Flynt reports that she is control of her faculties. So the questions of whether this is an exploitation of an aging writer seems to be unfounded based on Flynt’s observations.

Update: An article in the Birmingham News on Feb. 5 by a reporter who interviewed several locals in Monroeville who know Harper Lee suggests that they think she was pressured into releasing the book. In an article from CBS Atlanta on Feb. 5, the reporter interviews a few more people and is not as conclusive. Clearly her lawyer is involved and encouraged Harper Lee to publish the book. Yet, I think that this book would probably have been published as soon as she died, so maybe it is better to get it out now while she is alive and can be cognizant of more appreciation.

What makes the publication of Go Set a Watchman so fascinating is that it is like having Boo Radley come out of his house after all these years. 

So 55 years after the publication of TKAM this sequel is a summons up from the past. Just like Scout, in this new novel readers of TKAM are drawn to return to Maycomb to see how the past measures with the present.

Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers & ISU connections, an interview on WGLT

Thanks to Judy Valente for her delightful interview of me on WGLT about Mary Poppins as both a delightful filmJulie Andrews as Mary Poppins and P. L. Travers, author of the book and a popular children's book as well as a small, but interesting connection of ISU to P. L. Travers. Judy is such a great interviewer.

Disney's Mary Poppins film was released 50 years ago this week. As we learned in the recent Disney film Saving Mr. Banks, P. L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins series, was never happy with the adaptation. Pamela Travers was opinionated, but thoughtful, and certainly had a wide range of interests including Zen Buddhism and mytical Sufism. 

In the WGLT interview, Judy asks why Mary Poppins, the film, has such a long-standing appeal with both adults and children. I think that it is partly because Travers understood that children whose lives are in even a small amount of dissarray fantasize about order and everything working out. But it is also because Walt Disney understood the humor and charm of the story and could add the studio's magic to make it wonderful entertainment. Finally, the film causes adults to not only reflect back on their childhood but to consider how they are as parents; are they fulfilling their own hopes and dreams for their family?  The film is more complicated than we perhaps realized when we saw it as children, but that, in turn, makes seeing it again just as fulfilling.

Thanks, again, to Judy Valente for the opportunity to thoughtfully reflect on the delightful film as it turns 50.

Children's Lit does well with Academy Awards ... or were kids and films misunderstood?

Martin's Scorsese's film interpretation of Brian Selznick's award-winning graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Martin Scorsese shows Brian Selznick's book to young cast members while filming Hugo.Cabret received five Academy Awards last night.  Pretty impressive.  Not the big picture of the year award -- that went to The Artist. But both films received the same number of awards.  Actually, Hugo was nominated for 11 awards, the most of any film this year. Curiously, too, both The Artist and Hugo are somewhat wistful film meditations on early cinema.

We were glad to read on School Library Journal that Brian Selznick was in the audience at the (former) Kodak Theater.

"Being on the red carpet, being in the room live as the telecast was underway, hearing the name Hugo called five times..., all of it was an experience I will never forget," Selznick told SLJ. "[I]t was really fun to introduce myself to famous people by saying I wrote the book that inspired Hugo and having them throw their arms around me, thank me for the story, and tell me they've seen the movie more than once... and some of them had even read the book and loved it too!"

In addition, the award for best animated short film  went to William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg's The A still from The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris LessmoreFantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. Here's a link to the 15 minute YouTube video. It's also cool that the film was created by a Moonbot, a Shreveport, Louisiana, studio.  Good to see animation developed in the U.S. and from a studio in the south. It is also available as an Apple app.

The animated film is "a poignant, potent ode to books," according to the Kirkus Review, which seems ironic to incapsulize in an iPhone app.

William Joyce is another imaginative children's picture book author as well as an Emmy-winning television creator of Rolie-Polie Olie and George Shrinks. Disney's 2007 animated film Meet the Robinsons is based on Joyce's book A Day with Wilbur Robinson.

On the other hand...

As YPulse points out today, last night's Academy Award program was not particularly welcoming to tweens or teens.  It began with Billy Crystal putting on Justin Bieber for the "18 - 24 crowd" when, in reality, his core fan base is more 12 - 16 year olds, and primarily girls, too.

Oddly, only two songs were nominated for best song in an era when songs within films, and television shows, are important landmarks to creating a film's environment and atmosphere.  But neither song was performed live.  Why not?  "Man or a Muppet" is such a catchy tune, in an odd way, that even Terri Gross, interviewer of NPR program "Fresh Air," admits she likes it. 

Perhaps Justin Beiber could have performed "Man or a Muppet."  That might have excited Martin Scorsese's daughter, who was sitting next to him during the awards ceremony and looking a bit bored for most of the night.  Or, Why not have Oscar the Grouch present an Oscar?

The final Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 was nominated for three Academy Awards, but did not receive a statue in any of them.  Huffington Post's high school blogger Marissa Piazolla understands Harry Potter fan's sadness when the final film failed to recieve an Oscar this time.  In the categories that Harry Potter was running against Hugo, I actually thought Harry Potter had the better achievement.

On a final note, did you watch closely the preview for The Hunger Games?  Didn't it look like the older sister Catnis is giving the Mockingjay pin to her younger sister Prim before the reaping?  But in the book, Catnis receives the pin from the mayor's daughter when Catnis is about to go off to the reaping.  Catnis isn't familiar with the importance of the Mockingjay pin at that point.  Clearly there are changes afoot.

But we're still going to see the film when it opens.