A Blog of Bosh

Why I’ll always have a soft spot for the lovely Lady Mondegreen
Homophones upset grammarians. But Mondegreen Rules, OK? They are a source of gaiety in the English language. Falstaff, Alice, Dickens and Edward Lear would be lost without them. Thomas Hood made an oeuvre from them. “His death which happen’d in his berth,/ At forty-odd befell:/ They went and told the sexton, and/ The sexton toll�d the bell.” Schoolboy riddles depend on them. “Waiter, waiter, what’s this?” “It’s bean soup.”
The Times

The Uses of Enchantment
In ”The Little Mermaid,” Hans Christian Andersen suggests that immortality can serve as a substitute, however unsatisfactory, for human love. The story is clearly an allegory for his own life, for the unloved Andersen, more than 125 years after his death, can lay as good a claim as anyone to artistic immortality. At a time when children’s stories were exclusively moral and didactic, he revolutionized the genre by infusing it with the humor, anarchy and sorrow of great literature. He expressed the most painful and rawest emotions with extraordinary aesthetic control; the results rivaled anything produced by the great Romantic writers who were his contemporaries. In his simple, unpretentious way he told us as much about the human condition (think of ”The Emperor’s New Clothes,” ”The Snow Queen,” ”The Fir Tree”) as any of the world’s writers and philosophers.
The New York Times Book Review

Poetics of Children’s Literature
by Zohar Shavit
The University of Georgia Press, Athens and London, 1986
[Full text online.]

Pinocchio, questo benedetto toscano
Concepito nell’aprile 1881, il capolavoro di Collodi compie centoventi anni. La Toscana ha perci� indetto il “1° Festival del Teatro di Pinocchio”. Molti spettacoli in tutta Italia.
[On the aniversary of Collodi’s conception of Pinocchio, with a short reference to EL.In Italian.]
Il Nuovo

Why is it de rigueur for members of the avant-garde to try to stump us? Think of the Surrealists and the Dadaists, with their deadpan refusal to make sense; the authors of the French nouveau roman, with their poker-faced descriptions of trivial things; and the inexplicable mathematical games of Raymond Queneau. The present-day heirs of this tendency are conceptual artists, with their penchant for inscrutable brainteasers. When did ”experimental” become synonymous with ”mystifying”? Mark Ford’s smart new biography, ”Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams” (Cornell University, $35), hints at a novel answer: with Roussel (1877-1933), a strange and possibly mad French poet and fantasist whose following has included many of the most influential avant-gardists of the 20th century. Roussel’s power is that for them he functioned as a kind of proto-Andy Warhol. They could never be sure if he was pulling their leg.

The New York Times Book Review

Les illustrateurs jeunesse
Cette sélection présente un nombre important d’illustrateurs et d’auteurs-illustrateurs pour la jeunesse, classès par ordre alphabétique, par nationalité et par époque. Cette liste est régulièrement mise à jour. Elle signale les artistes confirmés mais aussi ceux moins connus. Chaque entrée introduit à une biographie de l’illustrateur, une bibliographie, à une série d’illustrations de l’artiste, ainsi qu’à des liens éventuels.
Régulièrement, de nouvelles images, visibles en format vignette, sont intégrées à cette base.
[A very complete database.]