Daemons, how fascinating. What is with the chef who has a daemon that is the same sex? What is Pullman trying to say here?Understanding a daemon is very complex, because a daemon is not only part of a person, but also somewhat of an individual. I was thinking I would love to have a daemon, because then I would know who I am. Or at least I would have some solid, factual sense of who I am. I would still love to have a daemon, a constant companion. You know the saying you come into this world alone and you leave it alone. Well this wouldn't be true if you had a daemon. But I don't know that a daemons shape would tell you something you didn't already know about yourself. For instance, if you had a dog daemon, you would know that you are loyal, but I feel like you would already know that. Also if you knew something bad about yourself would you see that in your daemon, or would others see that. For instance if your daemon was a snake. In the book Sir Charles' daemon was a snake, and we knew that he was a bad guy, this confirms our notion of snakes, but does it work for others? Many people have different symbols for animals so this would not be the clearest way to asses a person. This reminds me of names. You know some people have names that just fit their personalities. Like an nerdy guy named Lawrence, it just seems to fit simply unexplainable or on the verge of explanation. Another issue is the fact that their called daemons, which is demons. Pullman is hinting at the idea that this is our "bad" side or more so that it is the natural side. The instinctual? Very cleaver that Pullman, and very interesting those daemons.
I'm sorry to say but I think the site has been changed. So I hope you all found out what your daemons were.

My favorite chapter is Advice from a Caterpillar. I'm not entirely sure why. It's the question who are you. She ponders change and explains that she doesn't know her self. The lovely words meld together and create a sense of not knowing. I enjoy it because the question, who are you, is as unanswerable as the question, what is a child. There is no clear and determined answer for these questions, because at all times people are changing and learning, or reverting back to innocence. Maybe this will change with age, but I feel I am an adult, and yet I don't know so little, that I must surely be a child. This chapter suggest that who are you is the most important question while at the same time declaring that it doesn't matter because the answer at the moment is arbitrary. It's very deep for a childrens book. No that's dumb. It's very deep because it's (at least ment for) a childrens book.

Notes

11/5

"Nothing in his life became him as much as his leaving it"

*To read this book is to read all other books*

Everything is possible in Dream: dreams are a mythologizing of yourself

My Book and Heart Shall Never Part

This film left me with questions. I suppose that is what all good works of art suppose to do. It blurs the nature or my understanding of the nature of children, books, and nature. We sometimes see children as animals, or conversing with animals as if they were people. And is a book read or are we the books. Life inspires Art, Art inspires Life. We create the things we know and teach them to our children. So we are all vaguely and at the same time book, child, and nature.

NOTES

11/3

Alice and Wonderland prevaids our culture
Trainer of Imagination

*google The Idiot, Dostoevsky*

http://www.online-literature.com/dostoevsky/idiot/

NOTES

10/29

Walter Pater
-Conclusion to the Renaissance

"Most of us only have a handful of moments, the wisest spend those moments indulging in art and song." Art for arts sake.

Round
"In the end what is important is the music"

T.S. Eliot
"we shall not cease from exploration...

History and Mythology; connect the real and sureal

Symbolism of tears; metaphor for a sense of compassion and its healing powers

NOTES

10/27

Sublime: exaltion, realm where words are not relevant;

"All arts aspire to the condition of music"
-you don't ask what does it mean, but simply experience it for what it is.

Watts Poem
-busy bee, didactic and pious; irritating in its pioty

Facts: There was a girl named Alice (Alice was a real person)
Matrix eludes to Alice in Wonderland
Esotaric: not understandable

NOTES

10/20

New test on Alice and Wonderland/Sunderland, levels and tension

Iconoclasm: warning of the power of image

Jane Er; passage from B&B

-Tigers Bride, by Angela Carter

Symbol of a Rose
-eastern version is the lotus flower
-eating of an apple or stealing of a flower are not particularly serous crimes

Notes

10/18

Literacy
Didactic: teaching morals, nationalism, etiquette, very pragmatic: don't drink from a hot tea kettle.

Humor: what is nature?

Metaphysical/Physical
speculative
-become less of a child

*"all children's lit. deals with our Adult nostalgia/idealized longing for home"*

Harriot Beacher Stowe

1.

• If we show them nature, they'll think about god. (influence from protestant reformation, and gutenberg; anyone can read.
• 1650: John Eliot; natives of masachusets to learn to read published in Elgonquin, two world views colliding."why do english men hate snakes?" Thought process: natives are like children

2.

• Enlightenment: dieism rather than theism
• Rational person can be good
• Charles Willson Peter; museum of artifacts like skeletons, creates cracks in world view. Learn but don't Question
• Darwins Origin, images conflict with text
• Iconoclasm: shattering of the image
• Facsimile: look like old one
• Noah Webster; blue back spell, regularizing spelling for an american language
• teaching children to think

"How do I know what I think untill I see what I say"

Notes

10/15

Q:What is the last word, excluding moral, in Debemonts Beauty and Beast
A:Virtue

designed for girls/young women
18th and 19th century
Didactic: trained, educate
A: In adams fall we sinned all (not Eves'?)

Notes

10/8
Charles Dickons
"First Love"

Alice in Wonderland
Louis Carrol Oats: response to childrens literature as a teaching tool. He twists the morals

Arny Thomsan
Catalogue of stories: Search for lost husband, or Beast groom

King Kong: Universal Truths, such is the story of beauty and the beast

Foil: reflectors, sisters vs protagonist

Reading is: being on both sides of the pages

Animal Groom: anxieties about marriage, arranged marriage to older men, brace women for marriage, wealth over the considerations. Complexities of romance/love and marriage/euphemism. Ritual; institution of marriage (bondage/rape)

Deboumont; pious instruction, manners designed for girls and young women, so girls will benefit from these stories.

Notes

10/6

Beauty and the Beast
Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale

Midsummer Nights Dream
Episodic:
-The Golden Ass
-Cupid(aros; powerful force of love) and Phsyche (soul; represented by a butterfly)
What's being said and How it's being said:
-"give me a copper and I'll tell you a story"
-responsibility of the story teller
Once Upon a Time
It happened and it didn't happen
-responsibility of child
Willing suspension of disbelief

Cupid and Phsyche

-3 beautiful daughters -B&B. 3 sisters
-Venus jealous -SW. jealousy of girl
-Cupid, sent to get rid of her -HMH. beast husband, invisible husband
-Orecal
-Cupid save girl
-castle, goes to sleep
-food -B&B
-sleeping/wispering; fears of chastity
-sisters, betrayel; leads to their death

*google Cupid and Psyche*

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/cupid.html

Soul falls in love with love

Archetype: Creatures of nature there to help

Cinderella

Jack Ross- spoonerism: reverent spooner mix up words

Moral: beauty is a treasure

Tragedy is a clear eyed view of the world

I wrote this down, because I heard it in class, and It caught my attention. At the time I thought that it made sense. I don't know if I still agree. In one sence it opens your romantic and innocent eyes, but on the other hand it blinds the heart making it bitter and pesamistic. Perhaps being innocent is not being blind but seeing the world the way it is suppose to be.

No Original

I chose to dissagree with the notion that there is no original. It has to do with my need to belive there were first people who first decided to tell a story. This person would be like Lyra. They would be sitting around in a cave or around a fire, and felt we need to explain what happened to day. Having said this somewhat arbiratry statement I also find comfort in knowing that these first people will never be known, and that we all have the same stories to tell and read, maybe in different orders and characters with different names. It is a collective comfort that we gain from reading the same stories over and over. They are like instruction manuals from those befor us and our stories will be manuals to those after us. That is why we "must tell them stories, they need to hear stories."

Notes

10/3

"The hard facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales"

*google Ur*

http://lexicorient.com/e.o/ur.htm

Abraham left to find the land of milk and honey. Ur the home land. For lituratures sake Ur. represents the original text, which is a rhetorical claim. And has no basis in reality. (or so Professor Sexson says). No original text, only revisions.

-The uses of Enchantment, by Brunal Benal Hime

"I am vast I contain multitudes"

(please help me, I didn't write down who said this, does anyone know?)

"Tragedy is a clear eyed view of the world. " I'm not sure where this statement came from either, but it must have been said in class, because I have it written down.

Why tell the same tales

1. Migration of stories
2. collective unconciousness

Why I'd choose The man

Why I'd choose the man.
Vanity perhaps? Appearance drives our natural instincts, which are influenced by media and culture. We search for others like us and others that are attractive to us. Looks are the first thing we notice about a person, but are these things strong enough to argue for a change in our lovers? Perhaps for me it is the aspect that you can have the best of both worlds. Your person doesn't change because their appearance changes, maybe it would after a while, or maybe not. But, the person you fell in love with is in there. I always thought that this is what I would want. But I cannot imagine giving up the face, the eyes, the nose, or hair, that I love. There is something more to physical appearance. Perhaps I am moving into the realm of misplaced concreteness. It seems some what selfish to want the beast if the man was a man first. Or another question that is brought up with this argument is would you still love the man if he turned into a beast. The stories tell us no, but add a little misplaced concreteness, subtract a bit of vanity, and of course you would love your person even if they gained a horrible scar that made them look hideous, or if they grew a little hair on their chest. Taylor's argument is impossibly beautiful and extremely difficult to argue against, especially since she has written such a wonder full paper, so I won't try any harder than I already have, because she has won me over and I am not capable to make this decision. I would love the person beast or man, but a nice handsome man wouldn't be too hard to get use to, if the person inside stayed the same.

Notes

10/1

Hans My Hedgehog
Motiefs

• Beauty/Beast
• Jebtha, promis to sacrifice his daughter (Rash Promise)
• Transformation into hansome
• 3's promis, iron shoes
• Daughter's sacrifice/like marriage; passing property, demeter and persephony
• Husband and wife can't have kids
• Monster baby (Rosmaries Baby)
• Desperate Mother (Not careing), Phycological necessity
• Parent hating child (Stepmothers usually take this role)
• lost in a forest, found a mysterious house/castle
• a year and a day- formulas, language; repetition of same language, epithas
• children forever laughing at the oddball
• importance of animals

Notes

9/12

"Not what does this poem mean, but how does this poem mean."

Journy Cycle

• Seperation
• Intiation
• Return

Eve and the apple; (RRH, SW)

"Don't do this, so Do this"

-the moral becomes do it; cannot forget the call to adventure

Efemeral Rubish: the crap you read all the time, still has an unobstructed view of archetypes.

Archetype: Manifestation of constant and reoccuring themes, from the collective unconsious of human kind.

Innocent Reading-Sophisticated Reading

Ground Hog Day; read the complexity of a normal day

-Asian Mythology-eternal return

Notes

9/8

-The Feminine in Fairy Tales
ML Von Franz

-The Beast to the Blond on Fairy Tales
Marina Warner

-The Classical Fairy Tales
Iona and Peter Opie

*google, Angusih Landguish.com*

http://www.justanyone.com/allanguish.html

Notes

9/5

"All liturature is a displced myth."
-Frye

*google red shoes*

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040725/

Fairy Tales

• in fairy tales few people have actual names; mother, father, huntsman etc.
• 3's and 7's
• the story demands it, so it happens.(how can a frog knock on a door)
• Generic/Archaic characters

Suggested Readings

• Little Red Riding Hood, by Alan Dunes
• Alice in Wonderland, by Donald J. Gray
• Don't tell the Grownups, by Little Brown
• Fairy Tales and After, by Roger Jale
• Cinderella, By Alan Dunes
• The Classic Fairy Tale, Iona& Peter Opie
• Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked, Sex Morality and Evolution of a Fairy Tale, by Catherine Orenstein
• Pipers at the Gate of Dawn, by Jonathan Colt