educating alice

Chris Riddell is doing illustrations for the British children’s edition of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book while Dave McKean is doing an adult version. And now Neil has posted a few of Riddell’s illustration on his blog here and I must say, they creep me out. But then I also find Dave McKean’s illustrations for Coraline too scary for my students and don’t show them when I read the book aloud.

For that matter, the forthcoming graphic novel of Coraline with illustrations by P. Craig Russell is also problematic for me because Coraline looks way too old in it for me. I guess I had always imagined Coraline to be around the same age as Alice — eight or nine, close to the age of my students. But the graphic novel makes her look several years older. Closer to the girl in Mirrormask than my imagined image of Coraline.

What strikes me about this is that kids eight to ten are getting a bit squeezed out here. I mean, there are the more sophisticated picture books that they love such as Gaiman and Grimley’s Dangerous Alphabet, but then there is a BIG leap upward to Coraline and The Graveyard Book in terms of illustration. Sure, some of my students will go for both, but many will not. And I think that is too bad because I think Coraline is very much for them. I’ve read it aloud many times with great success. But those illustrations are scary, scary, scary!

World Premiere
May 6-June 20, 2009
Coraline
Music and Lyrics by Book by
Stephin Merritt David Greenspan
Based on the Novel by
Neil Gaiman
Directed by Leigh Silverman

Poor bored Coraline. She’s left to rattle round her perpetually distracted parents’ house all by her lonesome. Then one day, her dreams of a better reality are answered as she steps through an old oak doorway and passes into a perfected replica of her own world. Greeted there by a vastly loving Other Mother and kindly Other Father, she’s thrilled! But, as the saying goes: Be careful what you wish for…

A musical like no other, Coraline sprang from the minds of three of the most wildly popular cult heroes of our time. Adapted from the truly terrifying children’s book by Neil Gaiman (author of the international sensation Sandman), this tale of menace and mayhem is set to music and lyrics by smart-rock iconoclast Stephin Merritt (of The Magnetic Fields), and boasts a book by celebrated downtown actor-cum-auteur, David Greenspan, who serves double-duty as the villain, Coraline’s suspiciously nurturing Other Mother.

At the MCC Theater at The Lucille Lortel Theatre :: New York City

From Neil Gaiman, natch.

Years ago I saw this remarkable painting as part of an extraordinary exhibit of Victorian fairy paintings. Here is the Tate’s (where it is on permanent display) description of it:

Richard Dadd painted this work in the Bethlem Hospital where he was sent after murdering his father and being declared insane. The scene was drawn from his imagination. It shows the ‘fairy-feller’ poised to split a large chestnut which will be used to construct Queen Mab’s new fairy carriage. The style, subject and shifting scale of the painting all contribute to a sense of the fantastic that fits the critic Herbert Read’s idea of an imaginative tradition running through to Surrealism in the early twentieth century.

Now Neil Gaiman has posted “Me and my Dadd and Mark Chadbourn,” an introduction to a work of fiction. Here’s how it begins:

Reason tells me that I would have first encountered the painting itself, the enigmatically titled Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, reproduced, pretty much full-sized, in the fold-out cover of a QUEEN album, at the age of fourteen or thereabouts, and it made no impression upon me at all. That’s one of the odd things about it. You have to see it in the flesh, paint on canvas, the real thing, which hangs, mostly, when it isn’t travelling, in the Pre-Raphaelite room of the Tate Gallery, out of place among the grand gold-framed Pre-Raphaelite beauties, all of them so much more huge and artful than the humble fairy court walking through the daisies, for it to become real.

If you ever get a chance to see the painting you will understand why it and its history are so beguiling.

Those commitments and a few others, including a workshop for a musical based on the children’s story “Coraline,” will keep Ms. Houdyshell occupied through next year.

Buried in After Years in Road Shows, Jayne Houdyshell Is a Middle-Aged Star in New York - New York Times

I posted a few quotes from Neil Gaiman as he blogged about his writing of this book. But someone else has now assembled them all into one post: A Brief (Or Not So Brief) History of the Graveyard Book.

I’m looking forward to this collaboration by Neil Gaiman and Gris Grimly due out in April. Neil writes on his blog, “If it works, it’ll be a sort of interactive book. The pictures tell a story, the words amplify it, but really, what actually happens in the book will be something for each reader to decide. I hope.”

From Neil too:

Neil Gaiman has been posting remarkably honest updates on his blog as he writes this book. Since these are often buried in posts covering all sorts of other interesting things I’ve put some of them here to entice you to read his blog regularly if you are not already doing so.

January 8th:

I’m more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I’m at that place where I hope that the book knows what it’s doing because right now I don’t have a clue — I’m writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it’s actually going to lead him.

January 21st:

The Graveyard Book is back on track, I think, and the thorny and evil thicket that was Chapter Six has been traversed and, I am told, does not sound like I was making it up as I went along, but sounds as if I knew what it was about the whole time. This makes me happy, because it was miserable writing it.

January 28th:

I’m still in Chapter Seven. Yesterday was very talky. Today stuff may happen.

January 31st:

There’s an odd point in writing, when you reach a bit that you’ve known was going to happen for years. Years and years. And then it doesn’t happen like you thought it would…

It’s as if there’s a ghost-story behind the text and nobody knows it’s there but me.

February 3rd:

Yesterday I reached the moment I’d been dreading for years, where you learn why the things that happened in the first chapter happened (which I hadn’t known when I wrote them. I knew that they had happened, but not why) and as I started to write it, I realised that it was pretty obvious, so I wrote it, and learned a lot.

February 5th:

… But I know that it’s [Chapter Seven] almost done since I’ve started worrying about the eighth and final chapter, and you don’t do that until the one you’re on is nearly done.

A present from Neil Gaiman: Coraline Sneak Preview.

“My biggest problem with Harry Potter is that I went to an English public school and hated it,” he says. (By “public school,” the English mean what Americans mean by private school.) “I would have rather lived under the stairs.” From Lev Grossman’s Geek God.