Chicken Spaghetti: Fairy Tales

Today's Poetry Friday selection is "Beauty and the Beast: An Anniversary," by Jane Yolen. I found the poem in the archives of The Journal of Mythic Arts at The Endicott Studio. Told from the point of view of Beauty, the poem checks up on the famous pair some years after the tumultuous events (and imagines a different ending for the original story).

I came to "Beauty and the Beast..." in a roundabout way. Lately I've been reading aloud from a book of Japanese folk tales. My son studied Japan in second grade last spring, and he is still keen to hear more about the country. Digging around on the Internet for more folk- and fairy-tale information, I re-discovered the SurLaLune Fairy Tales web site, which has been re-designed since my last visit. This is one comprehensive site. Wow. If you have any interest in the genre, SurLaLune is a must-see.

SurLaLune highly recommended The Endicott Studio, where I came across the Yolen poem. I've already seen familiar faces and fellow bloggers there: both Gwenda Bond and Colleen Mondor are contributors to the current issue of The Journal of Mythic Arts.

While I didn't find anything on Japanese folk tales, I found fascinating diversions. Yay for the Internet! (Update 7/28: As it turns out, SurLaLune contains the text of the 19th-century book Tales of Old Japan; I just missed it on the first go-round.)

For more Poetry Friday offerings, see Jone, at Check It Out. She has the roundup.

Greetings, y'all! I've been on the road this week. Yesterday I spent five hours in the Baltimore airport, giving me plenty of time and then some to read the entire November/December issue of The Horn Book, the magazine devoted to children's literature. I enjoyed it, particularly Brian Alderson's article "H.C. Andersen: Edging toward the Unmapped Hinterland." (It's not available online.) Noting that Hans Christian Andersen was apparently "not too much preoccupied by illustration," Brian Alderson makes some forthright observations like the following:

The penchant that illustrators have for booking themselves ego-trips on the back of any passing classic tale is of long standing, and a proper judgment of their work hinges not on the aesthetics of the thing but on the adequacy of their response to the text that prompted it.

Alderson was a curator of a recent British Library exhibit devoted to HCA. In the Horn Book piece, he also talks about famous author's "uninhibited storytelling vernacular" (one that would seem right at home in the corner pub) and how hard it has been for translators to capture that colloquial quality of Andersen's work.