Fairy Godmother Research Articles

Lucky Hans and other Merz fairy tales

Kurt Schwitters revolutionized the art world in the 1920s with his Dadaist Merz collages, theater performances, and poetry. But at the same time he was also writing extraordinary fairy tales that were turning the genre upside down and inside out. Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales is the first collection of these subversive, little-known stories in any language and the first time all but a few of them have appeared in English. Translated and introduced by Jack Zipes, one of the world's leading authorities on fairy tales, this book gathers thirty-two stories written between 1925 and Schwitters's death in 1948--including a complete English-language recreation of The Scarecrow, a children's book illustrated with avant-garde typography that Schwitters created with Kate Steinitz and De Stijl founder Theo van Doesburg. Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales also includes brilliant new illustrations that evoke the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Schwitters wrote these darkly humorous, satirical, and surreal tales at a time when traditional German fairy tales were being co-opted by the Nazis. Filled with sharp critiques of German life during the Weimar and early Nazi eras, Schwitters's tales are rich with absurdist events and insist that not everyone--and perhaps not anyone--lives happily ever after. In Lucky Hans, the starving protagonist tries to catch a rabbit only to have it shed its fur like a coat and run off naked into the forest. In other tales, a sarcastic gypsy stands in for a fairy godmother and an army recruit is arrested for growing to monstrous size. Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales is a delightfully strange and surprising book. Jack Zipes is a leading authority on fairy tales. His translations include The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm and The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse (both Bantam). He is the editor of The Great Fairy Tale Tradition (Norton), and the author of Why Fairy Tales Stick and Hans Christian Andersen, among many other books. He is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. Reviews: Mostly unpublished during Schwitters's lifetime, the tales have been rescued from oblivion by teams of eager Germanists, and selected, translated and introduced for this edition by eminent fairytale scholar Jack Zipes. The tales are accompanied by cutely sinister illustrations by Irvine Peacock.--Justin Clemens, The Australian Including four pieces Schwitters wrote in English--he had abandoned German, as the Nazis' language--this volume stands as a substantial, chronologically representative, and delightful addition to the still small number of texts by Schwitters published in the U.S. Zipes supplies snappy translations and a thoughtful critical introduction.--Choice

My Fair Godmother (review)

Reviewed by: My Fair Godmother Jeannette Hulick Rallison, Janette My Fair Godmother. Walker, 2009311p ISBN 978-0-8027-9780-3$16.99 R Gr. 7-10 Sixteen-year-old Savannah's just been dumped by hunky, smart Hunter in favor of Jane, her equally intelligent older sister. As hurt Savannah plots revenge, Chrysanthemum "Chrissy" Evenstar, a teenaged "fair godmother" (because her grades in Fairy Godmother School "were just, you know, fair") in need of an extra-credit project, appears unexpectedly and offers Savannah three wishes. Savannah first wishes "that somehow my life could be like a fairy tale. You know, with a handsome prince waiting for me at the ball, and that somehow when I meet him, everything will work out happily ever after," but Chrissy misinterprets the request, actually turning Savannah into Cinderella and plunging her smack into the old-world milieu of that tale. Savannah's remaining wishes are also misunderstood, and the last drags a fellow student and track team member, Tristan, into the medieval fairy-tale world, where he must be made a prince before he may return to his own place and time. Rallison's writing is zippy and light as well as frequently humorous; Savannah and Tristan are eminently likable and the specific outcomes of their various dilemmas are not always easily foreseen, keeping the details of the plot fresh rather than boringly predictable even as their eventual pairing grants the expected happy ending. Teens looking for a breezy read with a fairy-tale bent will lap this up, and they may gain a little useful perspective on relationships and loyalty at the same time. Copyright © 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Hog Prince (review)

Reviewed by: The Hog Prince Hope Morrison Bardhan-Quallen, Sudipta The Hog Prince; illus. by Jason Wolff. Dutton, 200932 p ISBN 978-0-525-47900-0$17.99 R 5-8 yrs Eldon the pig dreams of being royalty, and every morning he longingly watches glittering, bejeweled carriages drive by his mudhole. A somewhat flustered fairy godmother arrives and informs him that he has been under the Hog Prince spell ("Was it a hog prince or a dog prince? Or was it a frog prince . . . ?") and that, upon kissing his true love, he will become a prince. Overcome with delight, Eldon goes about kissing all the beautiful human ladies he can find, while his best piggy pal Petunia, disgusted by the whole business, follows along, ultimately landing a big old smooch on Eldon's cheek, along with the admonishment, "You just don't get it, do you?" Though no transformation follows—it turns it was a frog that the fairy godmother was seeking—Eldon and Petunia are happy with their transformed relationship. Listeners don't need to be familiar with the story of the frog prince to enjoy this lightly fractured fairy tale; it stands on its own just fine, thanks especially to the creative characterization of Petunia, who carries the story with her staunch patience and piggy smarts. Eldon is a somewhat dopey but very likable pig, and his far from successful romantic encounters with the other ladies add just the right touch of humor. Cartoonish and energetically composed acrylic paintings illustrate Eldon's tale; though they're short on subtlety, they offer an abundance of textures, from the coarse, short hair of the pigs to the bright blue waters of the lake to the blades of green grass. The guest appearance of familiar fairy-tale folks, the gross humor of piggy kissing, and the happily-ever-after swine romance all work together to make this a squeally-good readaloud for the early elementary set. [End Page 233] Copyright © 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Fixing climate: what past climate changes reveal about the current threat--and how to counter it

The product of a unique collaboration between a pioneering earth scientist and an award winning science writer, Fixing Climate takes an unconventional approach to the vitally important issue of global warming. Wallace S. Broecker, a long time researcher at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, warned about the possible consequences of global warming decades before the concept entered popular consciousness. Hooked on climate studies since his student days, he has learned, largely through his own findings, that climate changes - naturally, dramatically, and rarely benignly.He also knows from experience that when mankind pushes nature as we are currently doing by dumping some sixty to seventy million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day, climate will change even more dramatically and less benignly. As Broecker points out, if a well-meaning fairy godmother were to turn us all into energy saving paragons at the stroke of midnight tonight, the resulting reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide might lessen but could not turn aside the great warming tide now headed our way. There is, nonetheless, a glimmer of hope in the development of new technologies that are directed not only at the reduction of carbon dioxide output but also at its harmless disposal. Told by skilled science journalist Robert Kunzig, Fixing Climate is a timely and informative story that makes for riveting reading.

That “Old Rigmarole of Childhood”: Fairytales and Socialization in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters

That “Old Rigmarole of Childhood”: Fairytales and Socialization in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters Carrie Wasinger Four and a half years before the serialization of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66), the Cornhill Magazine published “Curious, if True” (1860), one of the novelist’s last gothic stories. The narrator of that tale, Richard Whittingham, an archivist in Tours attempting to prove his genealogical descent from a sister of John Calvin, loses his way, like Wives and Daughters’s little Molly Gibson, in a dense wood. When he happens upon a lonely chateau, Whittingham knocks at the door, only to be welcomed into a gathering of eccentric individuals as if his visit were expected. These guests, who mistake him for the legendary Dick Whittington, turn out to be notable fairytale protagonists grown fat and old, degenerated–if not completely ruined–by the very attributes that made them fantastic. The story abruptly ends when Madame la Féemarraine (the fairy godmother) appears, and the narrator awakens beneath a tree to “the slanting glory of the dawning day” (286). “Curious, if True” challenged the conventions of mid-Victorian realism by defamiliarizing the domestic narrative, one of the most recognizable arenas for exploring the dynamics of adult sexual relations. In the story, Whittingham, a seemingly impartial narrator, presents an intricate web of marital and class tensions through the familiar idiom of the drawing-room anthropologist. Yet his detached scientific perspective jars against Gaskell’s all-too-apparent use of fantasy motifs. When Whittingham identifies his hostess Madame de Retz, for example, as a parvenu wife given to henpecking her spouse, the reader recognizes the tragically curious consort of the infamous Bluebeard who has since acquired a second, less notorious husband. This layering of quotidian matrimonial experience over fairytale narrative conventions creates an [End Page 268] uncanny effect and initiates an interpretive rupture. Simultaneously Whittingham, the archivist, and Whittington, legendary Mayor of London, the narrator balances uneasily between identifications. At first an enlightened interpreter whose distanced analysis seemed to secure his autonomy, Whittingham now becomes, like his new acquaintances, an object to be “read,” another signifier in a system of fairytale signs. Although “Curious, if True” eventually ejects Whittingham from its community of fairytale protagonists, it never secures his character; readers remain unsure whether to replace the name “Whittingham” with “Whittington.” Since no set of fantastic or realistic generic conventions emerges as a reliable method of identification, Whittingham never fits securely into the social circle in which he finds himself. Simply put, “Curious, if True” makes it impossible to definitely identify anyone. Gaskell habitually used fairytale in her longer fiction to signal such problems of socialization. However, critics of Wives and Daughters have generally subordinated a sustained discussion of the relationship between fairytale and socialization in Gaskell’s work to unflinching admiration for her realistic characterization and resistance to fantasy.1 Many argue that Gaskell’s attention to psychological detail and the complexities of social interaction form part of a larger and distinctly Victorian effort to assert, in George Levine’s words, the “power of the real over the imagined” (57), a novelistic project that appears diametrically opposed to what scholars often describe as the universalizing function of the fairytale.2 Indeed, an 1866 review commended Wives and Daughters for its lack of typology, fantasy elements, sensational devices, and “impossible fortune[s], showered into a last chapter, in the midst…of a transformation scene” (qtd. in Easson, Critical 471). This review articulated what has become the standard interpretation of Gaskellian realism and of the mid-nineteenth century novelist: obsessed with faithful and accurate reproductions of daily life, the best of nineteenth-century novelists sought nothing more than to tell meaningful stories through “the admirable, inaudible, invisible exercise of creative power” (463). Although aware of realism’s limitations, critics tend to characterize Gaskell’s project as an outright challenge to fairytale’s most appealing aspects: the fanciful, the grotesque, and the bizarre. In concentrating on Wives and Daughters’s materiality, its fascination with social science, natural history, and economics, and its declared intention to present an “every-day story,” readers neglect the extent to which Gaskell’s social project depended on her management...

The Fairy Godmother—and Her Warts

Evaluators sometimes wish for a Fairy Godmother who would make decision makers pay attention to evaluation findings when choosing programs to implement. The U.S. Department of Education came close to creating such a Fairy Godmother when it required school districts to choose drug abuse prevention programs only if their effectiveness was supported by “scientific” evidence. The experience showed advantages of such a procedure (e.g., reduction in support for D.A.R.E., which evaluation had found wanting) but also shortcomings (limited and in some cases questionable evaluation evidence in support of other programs). Federal procedures for identifying successful programs appeared biased. In addition, the Fairy Godmother discounted the professional judgment of local educators and did little to improve the fit of programs to local conditions. Nevertheless, giving evaluation more clout is a worthwhile way to increase the rationality of decision making. The authors recommend research on procedures used by other agencies to achieve similar aims.

Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales (review)

Reviewed by Jennifer Marchant Martin, Ann. Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. In Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiments in Art, Juliet Dusinberre sets out to connect the child readers of Alice and other children's literature not only with the adults they later became, [End Page 289] "but to a generation of thought and writing" (1). How, she asks, did such modern writers as Virginia Woolf, reflect and transform their childhood reading in their own texts? Ann Martin explores a similar question in Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales. She examines how three modern writers' allusions to fairy tales reflect these writers' views of their cultures, including such anxiety-laden factors as sexuality and gender roles, class mobility, commodification, and the relationships between tradition and present. In the first chapter, "Turning Back the Covers: Fairy Tales in the Modern Age," Martin briefly summarizes the history of the literary fairy tale in Western culture, from Apuleius's "Cupid and Psyche" in the second century AD, to the French salons of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and British chapbooks through the eighteenth century, to the pantomimes and Christmas books of the Victorians. She emphasizes the nineteenth-century's ambivalence about fairy tales: on the one hand, they evoked the "innocence" and "primitive nature" of the child and the peasant, whereas, on the other, their adaptation into modern culture in such forms as pantomimes, advertisements, and expensive picture books, suggested corruption and commodification. Martin suggests that this conflicted feeling, as well as the large number of variants, helped make the fairy tale a rich source of allusions for modern writers. In this chapter, Martin also explains her decision to focus specifically upon James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes. Although other twentieth-century writers reference fairy tales in their work, these three are among those who "use the stories to involve not just the past but the present" (40). Thus, Joyce, Woolf, and Barnes not only use the stories to suggest nostalgia and innocence, but to explore contemporary conflicts. Their fairy tale allusions also suggest the characters' and readers' power to make meaning. The characters actively adapt fairy tales to make sense of their lives, and readers must examine multiple, sometimes contradictory, fairy tale references to arrive at their own conclusions. Martin then proceeds to in-depth explorations of these writers' fairy tale allusions in some of their texts, drawing upon cultural, psychological, and gender theory to do so. In "James Joyce: The Fashionable Fairy Tale," Martin suggests that Joyce uses "Cinderella" to investigate both the possibility of class mobility in modern times and the loss of self this may involve. For example, in Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus is offered employment by several fairy godmother figures, but fears they would make him "a commodity in a capitalist system toward which he feels most ambivalent" (64). However, characters can also use fairy tales for their own ends, as is shown by the characters of Bloom and Gerty Macdowell, [End Page 290] who use "Beauty and the Beast" as a pattern for their sexual fantasies, but also tailor the story to meet their individual needs. In "Virginia Woolf: A Slipper of One's Own," Martin notes that fairy tales were very much a part of Woolf's literary upbringing. She made frequent reference to them in her journals and essays, as well as in her fiction. In particular, Martin describes the influence of Woolf's aunt, Anne Thackery Ritchie, who wrote adaptations of older fairy tales, such as Perrault's "Cinderella." Martin suggests that, in citing and transforming these stories, Woolf both acknowledges Ritchie as a female literary ancestress, and sabotages the Victorian values reflected in Ritchie's adaptations. In Woolf's Orlando, for example, the protagonist undergoes Cinderella-like transformations, but subverts traditional views of social...

Sobrevivendo a Violências: A Ludoterapia de uma Criança Abrigada

While he played, a boy of 8 years needed understanding for his fears, and had deposited it inside me not only by projective identification but also by that I could contain them for a while. Of patient L, there was an image where he played with one magical pole like the fairy godmother that he had found in the room. He said would feel homesickness for the House Shelter, where he lived. He is asked for what was happening and why he came back. It was emphasized that, even so full hatred, L could not act-out, but he could talk to the psychologist. The return was little more than one week later, when L appeared to the session after to be transferred of room from an infant child shelter to another one, to older children, saying that he gave order and could do everything. He felt the only responsible person for his adoption failure, supporting by his phantasy of omnipotence. In the next session, L goes until the attendance room and says that he still remembered of what had happened in previous session and of those things, he had talked about, and he regrets he would not continue his session. Perhaps he was saying that he felt psychologist was a person who had understood him and he want to be there with her, because she represented the bothered grandmother, who prevent him to do nothing and will punish him forever, by finishing the psychological treatment.

The Next Global Stage: Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World

Introduction. The Plot. I. THE STAGE. 1. The World Tour. The Curtain Rises. The World as a Stage. A Speedy Global Tour. Meanwhile in Ireland. Finland: In from the Cold. What Is the Global Economy? Borderless. Invisible. Cyber-Connected. Measured in Multiples. 2. Opening Night. The World AG. Leading the Dinosaur. The View From the Hotel: Detroit. Busting the Budget. Gates to the Future. 14 AG: China. Putting an e in Christmas. 3. The End of Economics. Reinventing Economics. Economic Theories That Once Fitted the Times. New Fundamentals Require New Thinking. Turning the Taps On and Off. Deflation and the GDP Deflator. Interests Rates and Nest Eggs. Can Physics Help? A Complex World. The Curve Ball. Oscillating Wildly. Paradigm II. The Power of Politics. The Difficulty of Changing Habits. Uncle Sam Goes Global. The New Economic Paradigm. II. STAGE DIRECTIONS. 4. Playmakers. Finding Your Bearings on the Global Stage. How Nation-States Retard Economic Development. The Nation-State Fetish. Strong States. The Rise of the Region. Defining the Region-State. Indian Summers. Carried Away in China. Not All Regions Are Created Equal. Surprising China. Microregions. Flexibility. Size and Scale Matter, But Not in a Traditional Way. Regions Are Gaining Their Deserved Recognition. Practical Considerations. What a Successful Region Has to Do. Branding Places. The Will to Succeed. Organizing Regions. Other Unions. Free Trade Area or Fortress? 5. Platforms for Progress. Relentlessly Forward. Developing Technology Platforms. Language as Platform. English Inc. The Platform Profusion. Other Platforms. 6. Out and About. Border Crossings. Technology: The Fairy Godmother. BPO: India as a Launch Pad. Dormant India. More Than a One-Country Wonder. BPO as a Platform. Home Sweet Home. Myths and Half-Truths. The View from India. Reaping the Benefits. BPO in a Borderless World. 7. Breaking the Chains. The Portal Revolution. The Search. Have You Been Googled Recently? Paying the Bill: The Payment Revolution. On the Rails. Delivery: The Logistics Revolution. The Arrival of the Micro Tag. Cool Chains and Fresh Food. Deliverance. Using Logistics to Solve Bigger Problems. For Dinner. III. THE SCRIPT. 8. Reinventing Government. Disappearing Power. Beyond Distribution. Size Matters. Downsizing and Resizing. A Vision for Change. The Japanese Vision. Mapping the Future. Visions Versus Mirages. Government Vision. Getting Noticed. Only Educate. Closing Down Distance. A New Role for Government. China: Governing the Ungovernable. Malaysia's Corridors of Power. Singapore's Appetite for Reinvention. Swedish Rhapsody. The Craic of the Irish. 9. The Futures Market. All Change. The Technological Future. Technological Progress Means Death Is a Fact of Business Life. The Rise of VoIP and Its Impact on Telecoms. Join the March Early. The Personal Future. Embrace Leadership. Value Information and Innovation. Embrace Flexibility. The Corporate Future. The Homeless Corporation. Innovation, Inc. The Adaptive Corporation. Beyond Hierarchy. 10. The Next Stage. The Regional Future. Hainan Island. Petropavlosk-Kamchatsily, Russia. Vancouver and British Columbia. Estonia. The Baltic Corner. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Khabarovsk, Maritime (Primorye) Province and Sakhalin Island, Russia. Sao Paulo, Brazil. Kyushu, Japan. 11. Postscript. Reopening the Mind of the Strategist. Beyond the Daydream. Index.

Belinda and the Glass Slipper (review)

Reviewed by: Belinda and the Glass Slipper Deborah Stevenson Young, Amy Belinda and the Glass Slipper; written and illus. by Amy Young. Viking, 200632p ISBN 0-670-06082-8$15.99 R 6-9 yrs Though Belinda (from Belinda the Ballerina, BCCB 4/03) is grandly sized, she's a talented ballerina, so she wins the role of Cinderella over petite little Lola. Jealous Lola locks Belinda in a closet on opening night and goes on instead; after the Fairy Godmother (well, the dancer playing the part of the Fairy Godmother) releases Belinda, the two ballerinas dance it out onstage, with only Belinda successfully fitting into the glass slipper. The Cinderella-within-Cinderella plot is that rare thing, a genuinely new twist on an old tale, and the ballet theme, with its ruffly French phrases ("Belinda pirouetted out of reach . . . protected herself with a well-executed battement . . . and she escaped with a stunningly brilliant tour en l'air"), has the same pink princessy appeal as the Cinderella story itself for a double-dip of girly goodness, with enough humor to keep things from cloying. The illustrations feature a bevy of attenuated ballerinas who seem to be crafted from pipe cleaners save for their round, solid heads; though the predominance of pastel shades undercuts the punch of some scenes, the visuals still offer delicate comedy that works with rather than against traditional ballet aesthetics. Ballet-lovers, Cinderella fans, and the many who are both will warm up to this tale that takes folkloric rivalry onto the dance floor. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Touched by an angel

Looking for a fairy godmother to back a brilliant business idea? As Tony Reichhardt reports, a group of them probably meets for breakfast once a month at a hotel near you.

Conversation with Griffith Edwards

Conversation with Griffith Edwards

Separation from the baby — a cause of PTSD?

The first proper book I read as a child at school left a deep impression perhaps because I realised that it opened a magic gate to other worlds. I was fortunate that the first book my teacher gave me was a Victorian classic by George MacDonald — The Princess and the Goblins. The little princess finds a secret staircase leading up to one of the turrets in the castle and meets a wonderful old lady who gives her a ring. If ever she is in trouble, she is to follow its magic thread which will lead her back to safety. Lo and behold when she and her boy protector, Curdie, are trapped in a tunnel pursued by the dreaded goblins, she feels her ring and finds an invisible thread attached which leads them back to safety and the loving fairy godmother. At 8 years old, I did not know the value of the lesson I was learning.

After a Long Journey Psychiatrist Helps at Home

After a Long Journey Psychiatrist Helps at Home

Cinderella's Coach Is Ready

The chemistry and biology of carbohydrates has been a Cinderella field: an area that involves much work but, alas, does not get to show off at the ball with her cousins, the genomes and proteins. What has rescued this Cinderella from the shadows is no fairy godmother but a plethora of new synthetic and analytic methods that a previous generation of researchers would have found nearly magical nonetheless. Carbohydrate modifications of proteins and lipids are key factors in modulating their structure and function within cells. In the extracellular milieu, they exert effects on cellular recognition in infection, cancer, and immune response, but details of the specific mechanisms have often been sketchy. This special issue looks at advances in chemistry and biology aimed at understanding and controlling the outcomes of carbohydrate recognition.[*][1] Pharmaceutical companies and biotech firms have long been interested in carbohydrate drugs, but successes have been few and far between. Prospects may be improving, however. In News stories, Alper (p. [2338][2]) charts the recent ups and downs of the field and explores carbohydrate compounds that are currently in clinical trials aimed at fighting everything from inflammation and tissue rejection to hepatitis and cancer. Service (p. [2340][3]) looks at the recent fortunes of companies trying to bring carbohydrate drugs to market and at a variety of strategies they are pursuing. Finally, four short profiles (pp. [2339][4], [2340][5], [2342][6], and [2343][7]) offer a broader look at research taking place in labs investigating the role of carbohydrates in areas ranging from prion diseases to human evolution. For chemists, studying carbohydrates has been labor-intensive compared to nucleic acids and proteins because of their branching and stereochemistry. Sears and Wong (p. [2344][8]) overview emerging synthetic methods, including enzymatic routes, for synthesizing oligosaccharides and attaching them to peptides and proteins, which should allow these steps to become more automated. Dell and Morris (p. [2351][9]) outline how ultrahigh-sensitivity mass spectrometry can be used to determine oligosaccharide structure, especially of glycoproteins, despite the small amounts and great complexity of the samples. Bertozzi and Kiessling (p. [2357][10]) show how chemical inhibition of glycosynthetic pathways can be used to elucidate function in cells and how these pathways could be hijacked to control oligosaccharide structure at cell membranes to alter recognition or target drugs. Our overview of the biological aspects of carbohydrates has mainly focused on carbohydrates that are attached to proteins. Helenius and Aebi (p. [2364][11]) focus on the role of cotranslational carbohydrate addition (glycosylation) and subsequent modification by sugar trimming and addition in the folding and transport of glycoproteins within the secretory system. Rudd et al. (p. [2370][12]) look at the role of the sugar moieties attached to many proteins and to some lipids of the immune system and their importance in immune recognition and immune surveillance. Finally, Wells et al. (p. [2376][13]) focus on the modification of cytosolic proteins by the addition of O-linked N -acetylglucosamine and its potential role in intracellular signal transduction mechanisms. The additional complexity and variety generated within the proteome by carbohydrates will provide further challenges beyond the one-to-one correlation of genetic sequence and protein sequence. We have already heard the word “glycomics” being whispered by guests at the ball. [1]: #fn-1 [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.291.5512.2338 [3]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.291.5512.2340b [4]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.291.5512.2339 [5]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.291.5512.2340a [6]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.291.5512.2342 [7]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.291.5512.2343 [8]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1058899 [9]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1058890 [10]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1059820 [11]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.291.5512.2364 [12]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.291.5512.2370 [13]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1058714

What If Your Fairy Godmother Were an Ox?: The Many Cinderellas of Southeast Asia

What If Your Fairy Godmother Were an Ox?: The Many Cinderellas of Southeast Asia

The fairy godmother effect

The fairy godmother effect

Happily Ever After

Managing serials in these changing times may make one wish that a fairy godmother would appear to wave her magic wand and make all their worries disappear. Today's serials managers must work a different kind of magic, however, and make working through change a tolerable, even enjoyable experience. This workshop provides suggestions for motivating staff during times of intense change. Giving staff autonomy, providing them with the training necessary to feel competent as their jobs change, and fostering feelings of being connected with each other and the library are but a few of the recommendations presented.

Questions for our fairy godmother

Why Aren't Black Holes Black? The Unanswered Questions at the Frontiers of Science. By Robert M. Hazen and Maxine Singer Anchor: 1997. Pp. 309. $12.95

Searching for Grace in Children's Fantasy

Searching for Grace in Children’s Fantasy Donna R. White (bio) John Goldthwaite. The Natural History of Make-Believe: A Guide to the Principal Works of Britain, Europe, and America. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. The words “Oxford University Press” on the title page of a book promise quality, depth, and insight in the work attached to that page. Oxford’s recent publications in children’s literature have lived up to the promise: the 3rd edition of Only Connect (with all new essays), Peter Hunt’s Children’s Literature: An Illustrated History, and Jill May’s Children’s Literature and Critical Theory: Reading and Writing for Understanding. Now Oxford has published John Goldthwaite’s literary history, The Natural History of Make-Believe: A Guide to the Principal Works of Britain, Europe, and America. This book compromises the Oxford promise in a small way. Goldthwaite is like the little girl with the little curl on her forehead: when he is good he is very very good, but when he is bad he is horrid. When he builds his arguments on solid evidence, his analysis is sharp and insightful, but too often he veers off into baseless speculation and ad hominem attacks on canonical authors. In his introduction Goldthwaite explains that he is writing a literary history of make-believe, which for his purposes consists of nursery rhyme, fairy tale, beast fable, and the modern literature descended from those three genres. He defines make-believe as “miracle stories.” For Goldthwaite, the goal of make-believe is to demonstrate the workings of grace in the world. The book of Proverbs, he claims, is the world’s oldest surviving children’s book—a Hebrew version of Aesop’s Fables that leaves out the stories but retains the morals. The presumed audience of Proverbs is a person addressed as “my son,” which to Goldthwaite suggests a young adult audience being instructed in right behavior. All make-believe descends from Proverbs, thus it is by nature didactic at some level. Children’s literature that comes closest to capturing a kind of numinous harmony, which Goldthwaite terms “allsense,” is the best kind of make-believe. [End Page 288] All three classes of make-believe involve fantasy. Goldthwaite posits four narrative strategems of fantasy that have developed in a loosely chronological manner: open fantasy, in which magic is a natural part of the world, as in fairy tales; circular fantasy, a kind of there-and-back-again narrative that is framed in our natural world but locates the fantastic in a realm beyond; closed fantasy, which is set completely in a Secondary World; and broken fantasy, a postmodern metafictional kind of fantasy that calls attention to its own fictionality. Because of his conviction that the true purpose of make-believe is to exhibit grace at work in the world, Goldthwaite disapproves of closed fantasies such as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings; only a fool or an apostate sets up his or her own creation in competition with God’s. Closed fantasies are merely escapist and cannot project “allsense.” Goldthwaite presents accurate historical facts in his discussions of the literary development of nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and beast fables, and he offers intriguing theses about literary influences and connections. For instance, he traces the figure of the feminized Wisdom in the book of Proverbs through Perrault’s fairy godmother to the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio and George MacDonald’s North Wind, arguing that these and similar female characters represent the Holy Spirit. His most persuasive thesis is that all animal fantasy is descended from the Uncle Remus tales; he marshalls a host of credible witnesses to prove this argument. The books discussed in this literary history include both classics and works of popular literature, but the list reflects a Eurocentric and, more specifically, Anglocentric bias. The “Principal Works of Britain, Europe, and America” mentioned in the subtitle comprise one title each from Italy, Finland, Denmark, and Germany; four titles from France; twelve titles from the United States; and thirty-six titles from Britain. (Apparently the only principle work of children’s fantasy published in Germany was the folk-tale collection of the Grimm brothers.) Of course, no single...