A Blog of Bosh

Land of make-believe
Eggs on legs and free booze: Marilyn Corrie enters a medieval fantasy in Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life by Herman Pleij
Guardian Unlimited Books

Twentieth-Century American Children’s Literature

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